End of the War; Beginning of the Starving - Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen

Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)

Chapter 10. End of the War; Beginning of the Starving

During the winter nights of January and February 1945, we sat around the kitchen table and talked about what life would be like after the war and what would be in store for us. Of course, Brother Len still believed in final victory for Germany, but he was the only one. I maintained that it was time for all of us to start learning English or French. We argued for a while, and high up we heard the drone of RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes going east and our 88s banging away not far off. Our local quads were out of business at night, but our searchlights were scanning the sky trying to catch an intruder in their beams. Berlin Radio had a special message to the people that night from Goebbels himself. ‘On our western front, the Allies have tried again unsuccessfully to penetrate our great Westwall near Straelen but were repulsed. American forces committed all their reserves to gain a foothold around Zülpich and south of München-Gladbach.’

‘That’s us Len,’ I yelled, ‘you heard it; south of München-Gladbach.’

‘Yeah I heard it,’ Len replied, ‘but we’re defending ourselves well and we’re counter-attacking to reverse all enemy penetrations.’

‘Len, you sound like Goebbels. Do you know that the Amis are already firing artillery into Baal, Linnich, and a few other places that are only twenty miles from us?’

‘Shut up; let’s hear what our Propaganda Minister has to say.’

Goebbels kept on ranting: ‘Near Düren, in the area of the main Allied offensive, 200 American tanks were destroyed. West of the Ruhr, near Krefeld, heavy enemy fighter-bomber activity has been reported. Our light flak shot down twenty-seven P-38 and P-47 fighters.’

‘We’ve shot down nothing in the last week,’ I informed Len ‘and as far as I know, neither has anyone else in our area. Krefeld is only twelve miles away and Giant would know about planes their quads shot down over there and he didn’t say anything about it.’

‘Well, the 88s might have got them.’

‘I know two things, Brother Len; 88s don’t waste ammunition on planes 200 feet up, and you only know how to dig holes in the ground.’

Goebbels went on: ‘The enemy forces intending to reach the Rhine have been repulsed, but fighting is still going on in the Hürtgen Forest. On other fronts …’

‘Turn that thing off;’ Mum shouted from the kitchen, ‘let’s hear some music.’

Len turned the radio dial to Beromünster (Sursee/Lucerne) but the Swiss station was quiet. Kalundborg in Denmark was transmitting marching songs and Stockholm had news in Swedish. We couldn’t understand what they were saying but we didn’t turn the radio back to Goebbels’ speech either.

* * *

The last days of February 1945 were the most dangerous times for civilians in the area along the western borders and the left bank of the Rhine River. Evacuations by that time had stopped altogether. There was nowhere to go, east or west. Germany was in a vice that would surely shut soon. Only a few diehards still believed in wonder weapons. The Volkssturm was useless and the Hitler Youth was eager but inexperienced. There were not many left who wanted to die for ‘Führer, Volk und Vaterland’. Once the US Ninth Army crossed the Roer River and the half-mile wide floodplain, there was not much the German Wehrmacht could do to stop them. Between the city of M-G and the Roer, the Wehrmacht could only muster a parachute regiment and a handful of Panther and Tiger tanks from the Panzer Lehr Division. Opposing them was the US 2nd Armoured Division, ‘Hell on Wheels’, equipped with some brand-new Pershing tanks. Those 46-ton monsters had a 90mm gun that could take on the Panthers and Tigers on equal terms. Supported by three infantry divisions and a huge armada of fighter-bombers, they advanced up to twenty miles a day and met only sporadic resistance. In some western suburbs, the Germans put up a resistance line and tried to stop the onslaught but to no avail. It was a different matter in some eastern suburbs. As the history of the US 2nd Armoured Division records; their Combat Command B bypassed the city of M-G, but in one suburb they met parts of the German 902nd Panzer Lehr Regiment supported by a Panzer Grenadier Battle Group. The Germans were ordered to attack late in the afternoon of 1 March, just as it started to snow. The Germans attacked, and in the ensuing firefight that lasted most of the night, they managed to push the Americans back to the outskirts of the city. The Americans lost about 110 dead and twenty-two tanks and halftracks. An unknown German tank gunner in a Jagdpanther destroyed five US tanks that night. The Germans lost four Panthers that they could ill afford to lose and then retreated toward the Rhine just before daylight came on 2 March. Ten civilians were killed and many others wounded that night because there was nowhere for them to go to get away from the fighting. The city fell late in the day on 2 March 1945.

A few days earlier, Brother Len had been ordered to report to the Hitler Youth headquarters to be deployed digging anti-tank ditches, his favourite pastime. We had no inkling of his whereabouts, but reports reached us that a whole battalion of Hitler Youth had tried to stop the 2nd Armoured Division just to the east of us, armed only with rifles and Panzerfausts. The entire unit was annihilated and we feared the worst. Alas, Len turned up a couple of days later. He had been captured by the 406th Regiment, 102nd US Infantry Division, before the fighting and sent home after interrogation. Brother Len was a bit put out by that; he had thought he was more important than to be sent home with a kick in the pants.

As early as the Hardt Woods battle (Battle of Jebsheim) that ended on February 2, there wasn’t much point in the quads trying to defend the crumbling Reich any longer. The big guns were disabled when the Americans arrived, along with an assortment of 37mm guns and a Maultier Nebelwerfer that had found its way to our position. The crew dispersed and a few of the men managed to obtain civilian clothing and mingle with the local population in their shelters. Brother Len remarked afterward that it had been a lovely war, but it wasn’t quite over.

After our school was closed indefinitely in August 1944, the local town administration took over the building. By 25 February 1945 there was nothing left to administrate, so those people who had supported the Nazis and feared the wrath of the Allies, left town, some on bicycles, the mayor in a car. They all fled across the Rhine. After the first air raid in February, some administrative departments were moved into the villages and into our school. It became the town council headquarters, still proudly displaying in huge Bakelite letters on the outside wall, ‘Adolf Hitler Schule’. On 2 March 1945, the US 102nd Infantry Division used the letters for target practice. The local police force, which by February 1945 amounted to forty officers, was also in charge of the air-raid wardens, the Red Cross and some engineering units. They had made their headquarters in a bunker at the food-processing plant. High up on the roof was a covered concrete observation post. One could see the Rhine River to the east, and to the west, the view was all the way to Holland. On several occasions, this little bunker had been the target of fighter-bombers, but it survived the war without a scratch. The fire department and the police department left M-G on 28 February. When the US Army occupied the city on March 1, the police managed to get across the Rhine without incident. However, after the capture of the Remagen bridge by the US 9th Armoured Division and the crossing of the river by Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, the police became part of the 300,000 Wehrmacht soldiers who were eventually surrounded in the Ruhr Cauldron. They all marched into captivity and were soon transported to Cherbourg as POWs.

When the shooting started late on 27 February 1945, the Nazi Bonzen loaded their belongings and some files on trucks and left the area around midnight, crossing the Rhine the following day. Only the Party chairman had the courage to stay behind. He and his wife committed suicide two days later. The Bonzen that fled returned weeks later as if nothing had happened. None of them had ever shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ or ‘Heil Hitler’, or so they said when they were interrogated, but the occupying forces were not convinced and locked up the whole bunch. The town by then had a US Colonel and a former Missouri police lieutenant as administrators. The police lieutenant spoke fluent German and had lived in Germany until he was twelve years old. His family had emigrated to the United States in 1920.

The GIs who ‘liberated’ our area - they were the enemy so we didn’t exactly see it as liberation - were amazed by the destruction their Air Force had caused to the inner cities. Pictures of flattened Aachen, Cologne, and Düsseldorf with white surrender bed sheets hanging out of windows made headlines in Allied newspapers. The American media had a field day when their GIs took control of the city of Rheydt, a city not too far from our little village. A white bed sheet was fluttering from the top window of the house Dr. Goebbels was born in. Goebbels visited his hometown several times during the twelve years the Nazis were in power and Göring was also there a few times.

* * *

Older Americans can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. That was how it was for us when the war ended. It was a sunny day in early May and I was sitting in our garden watching the military traffic roll along. Across the road was a parking lot where field kitchens were preparing some sort of food. American GIs were sitting on doorsteps reading newspapers or playing some sort of card game. A huge black soldier was sitting on our neighbour’s doorstep cleaning his fingernails with a bayonet. Suddenly there was shouting from the parking lot and a twin .50 calibre M2 machine gun started firing, with an unmistakable sound. Pistols and carbines were firing all around us. We just thought we were being attacked by the Wehrmacht or maybe the Luftwaffe but we didn’t hear any planes. Since we were outside, we all ran for our vegetable bunker near the garden. The firing slowed and we could understand a few words the GIs were yelling, ‘The war is over, Hitler’s dead.’ Hitler had committed suicide a few days earlier, but we didn’t know it. The black soldier came running over, waving his bayonet and grinning from ear to ear and stood by the fence, ‘Hitler’s finished, Allies bang bang.’ Yes, we had understood that finally the war was over. Celebrations by the Amis went on all night and they raided the wine cellar from the food-processing plant, but there were no incidents.

Generosity by the Amis was boundless beginning the very next day. It was like we had never been at war with them and they treated us like we had been allies. We smiled back when they smiled and we held our hands out for candy, coffee and cigarettes. Those were the ‘three C’s’ for us and were among the first English words we learned. The coffee was for Mum and Aunt Carol. The candy was for me, and the cigarettes were for Giant or for trading. Brother Len wouldn’t ask the GIs for anything. When Gunny left for Krefeld soon after the Americans arrived, we gave him the few cigarettes we had left and he traded them to the farmers in the area for butter or bacon. It was below the dignity of the farmers to ask for anything from the GIs, but they would certainly trade with us for American cigarettes. Because of the farmers’ steaming compost heaps, usually placed right by the front door, most soldiers avoided their houses and left them alone.

With the arrival of the US Army came a new worry for us; how to obtain food with all the shops being closed. That problem was soon partially solved when people starting looting Nazi stockpiles. The Party men had already fled, most across the Rhine, but with a curfew in place, no one was allowed on the streets after sunset, so looting took place in broad daylight while the Amis watched. I discovered a cache of Wehrmacht bread in what had been a bowling alley and that hoard was ransacked by the locals. Even the GIs helped by making sure everyone got a fair share. We got more than most; after all, I had found it. Our kitchen window was only a short distance from the bowling alley, but bread doesn’t keep indefinitely and a hundred loaves is a lot of bread to eat. Brother Len’s suggestion that we can it in glass jars was rejected. We didn’t have enough jars and Len hadn’t been right about too many things lately. Our air-raid shelter was damp and the bread soon got mouldy. We brushed off the mould and ate it anyway. Next we tried the attic under the roof; it was much drier there. We put the bread in cotton sacks and hung them up between the rafters. A little axle grease smeared on the strings and nails stopped the mice. We were well stocked with bread, but other things were in short supply, so we swapped German medals, badges and WHW pins for GI rations containing butter, sausage, Spam, and other goodies. One GI gave us coffee in return for water from our still-running tap. The electricity was out again, however, and would stay out for a long time.

In the first few weeks after the end of the war, Nazi doctrine was still too fresh in people’s minds. They thought we would all be put into labour camps or worse if we took anything from the occupiers. Among some of those who had been in power, there was enough guilt to go around and it spread to others; collective guilt they call it now. The personal experience of my family told me different and I was not much affected by the new local propaganda. Some people took to the Americans right away, some took a while, and a few never wanted anything to do with them at all. The GIs in our area didn’t loot, but a sort of swapping ground was established early on; a fancy Schneewittchen (Snow White) alarm clock for a tin of Nescafe or an Iron Cross for a can of Spam or a K-ration. Soon young children were running around with blown up condoms, thinking they were GI party balloons. Within a few months, every home had something from the Americans in it. I suppose the children were the first to break the ice; maybe it was the ‘Scheving Jum’ as we pronounced it (chewing gum), the candy bars and the oranges that did the trick. The mothers and Frauleins (German men were rarely seen) were attracted to the smell of real coffee the GIs brewed on their tanks. Chelsea and Lucky Strike cigarettes, white bread, tinned butter and liver pate won over the rest temporarily and the huge sacks of biscuit flour after the Marshall Plan went into effect made it permanent. Hunger was the dominant factor that broke down the barriers and kept them down.

The American GIs couldn’t feed everyone, and they only occupied part of Germany. We were in the same dire straits we had been in during 1918. There was peace, but no food. Germany was again a ghost country and famine became widespread. Children went to school hungry and left school at 1:00 p.m. even hungrier, despite the Allies’ soup kitchens. Some schools created sleeping hours for younger children during school time. We had to put our heads on our desks and rest or sleep. This was supposed to make us forget about being hungry, but the classrooms were cold and no one slept or rested. There was no coal for heating the place, so we were cold and hungry. When we left school, we had to queue up outside one shop or another for a few ounces of meat and eight ounces of flour or coal. Children did not play anymore. Of course, some people still looked well fed, mainly ex-Nazis who had managed to slip through the de-nazification net or Frauleins who had an American GI or British soldier as a friend. The hungry folks looked at them with disdain. ‘Good meals are a crime’ was the slogan of the time. If you had enough to eat, you probably did not get it legally or morally. Long queues for the evening meal at convents and hospitals were already formed by 2:00 p.m. Scrawny children with billycans (cooking pots) in their hands waited patiently for whatever was left over.

Soon after, German housewives developed the most sophisticated meals using Spam and potatoes. For a while after the surrender, Spam could be had from any good GI. They didn’t seem to care for it very much and were anxious to trade it for something. All that was needed was a German medal and a few words in English - especially Spam, and a deal would be made. Three small cans of Spam for an Iron Cross was the going rate. The bigger round five-pound cans could be had for three or four medals, or the affection of a German Fraulein. One enterprising local 23-year-old woman in our area was well known for her dealings with the GIs and eventually the American Military Police, who had gotten wind of her business, arrested her. She was caught in bed with an American Staff Sergeant from the quartermaster’s store. The hoard of food they found at her house would have kept a platoon of GIs fed for two weeks. She was released after a few days with a warning. Reichsmark fines were worthless because Reichsmarks were worthless. She was back in business soon and I think eventually ended up in Brauweiler Prison for Women. Spam was not on ration cards after the war and it was not available in shops.

Officially, a curfew was ordered immediately after our area was occupied, and people were only allowed to move around outside from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. to search for a shop that was open but there were none. The curfew was really because of the heavy American military traffic and the few diehard Nazis in our area that might cause trouble. Some of them believed a counter-attack was coming that would recapture the Rhineland. We had a first-hand look at the equipment the Americans brought along with them and knew there would be no such retaliation. We kids stood in the gardens, even during curfew hours, and watched the trucks and tanks go by. There were Shermans, M3s, M5s and M8s, Hellcats and occasionally a brand-new Pershing with its 90mm gun would roll past. These monsters were a match even for our Tigers and Panthers. We were not on the road and the GIs didn’t seem to care if we watched. Brother Len pointed at the high-topped M5s that we called Puckelpanzers (Hunchback tanks) and commented, ‘Ours are better.’

‘Well, where were ours when we needed them’? I replied.

During the Allied invasion, the US infantry, always looking for a way to hitch a ride to advance even faster, confiscated a few German military and civilian trucks with empty petrol tanks that had been abandoned by the retreating Wehrmacht. After being refuelled, they made good transportation for the weary footsoldiers. It was a hilarious sight to see a squad of GIs, armed to the teeth, hanging for dear life on the back of ‘Arndt Transport GMBH’ trucks. The company still exists today and still transports vegetables all over Germany. Some GIs found a few three-wheeled pick-up trucks. These were popular before and during the war as substitute transport for small loads. They had two wheels on the back axle, but only one in front and were powered by a two-stroke engine. With the arrangement of their wheels, however, they couldn’t cross the tread bridge across the Rhine, so the GIs burned them on the spot. Trams in Krefeld were commandeered, but without power, the things wouldn’t move so they were bulldozed off the road.

The local city administration had completely broken down during these turbulent days even before ‘liberation’, so the occupying powers had to introduce some sort of local government to provide basic services. The ration card system and the postal service needed immediate attention. The Allies printed some postage stamps marked a.m. Post for ‘Allied Military Post’ that were used alongside German stamps with Hitler’s profile on them partially covered with an ink spot. German ration cards were still printed for the time being with the issuing authority stamp inked over the Nazi eagle and swastika. The point system on the ration cards was the same as that used before the end of the war, but most of the items were not available in the shops that soon reopened their doors. The few items that were available were scattered all over the town and there was no coordinated distribution of anything. We had to walk miles randomly from one shop to another to get the few rationed items that we needed. Until June 1948, we still used the Reichsmark, even though it was practically worthless. I remember paying 500 Reichsmarks for a movie ticket in 1948. Before the war, this would have paid the rent on a nice house for a year. Ration cards were used up until 1949; we got them once a month for food. Later, they were different pastel colours for different items; then came the shoe cards, next the clothing cards, and permits were needed for everything else. The list was endless. Nothing had changed for us.

Our two local butchers opened their doors again after the surrender but with a very limited selection. The meat ration card might have shown points for 200 grams (eight ounces) of fat, which included bacon, but if the shop only had a few pounds for distribution, you were lucky to get two ounces. That was a couple of thin slices and it was supposed to last for a week. Fatback was not sliced and was issued in four- to five-ounce squares. Other meat, mainly pork, required several points, but if it was not available, you took what was. Bones, with the last molecule of meat stripped off, were sold one pound per card holder, but no ration points were needed. This system was the same for all groceries except fresh vegetables that could be bought at small farmer-operated vegetable shops. Beef was rarely seen even before the end of the war and it was just as rare after the war. Cattle grazing in pastures made easy targets for fighter-bombers and cows don’t grow in a few weeks to slaughtering size. Pigs were kept under the cover of sheds at all times before the end of the war. Bezugschein (permits) for other essentials came from the local economic office, just like during the war, and they stated exactly the item to be issued. Each item required a separate permit and it was still an endless task filling in the required forms. The men in charge of distribution and permits had to make sure that things were issued to those who really needed them. I remember one man, a Herr Sonnenschein, at the local economic office being attacked by an irate housewife over a permit for a pair of slippers. I’m sure this was not an isolated incident.

Soon enough, the main roads were cleared of rubble and once the power was back on, electric trams were put back on their tracks and started running. A twenty-Pfennig ticket could get you to almost any town since all cities in the Ruhr were connected by tram. M-G had fourteen different lines at the time and some ran for sixteen miles from the point of departure with stops at every other street corner. Until the de-nazification programme started in earnest, these services were operated by the same people who had been in charge during the Third Reich; that is, if they weren’t among those who disappeared before the Amis came. Goebbels told us that if we lost the war, Germany would be occupied for at least fifteen years. This information had leaked out of the Yalta conference and he used it in his propaganda in print and on the radio. If that was true, we thought, then why would they want to bomb the cities into rubble they would soon occupy? It made no sense.

Since our area was occupied in early March, gardens needed to be planted if there was to be any food for our family. Food storage facilities were empty and had been for some time, which just added to the misery of the have-nots who hoped they would get at least one meal a day after the war. Whether Germany could look forward to a good harvest in 1945 depended on the farmers that still had horses and ploughs. Former Wehrmacht soldiers cleared millions of mines from fields before they could be sown. Some of them were as small as matchboxes but they could still maim or kill. At times, farmers took the task of mine-clearing upon themselves. If they suspected there were mines in a field, they used one horse and an eighteen-foot wide harrow. They would walk fifty feet behind, holding the lines from the horse. This worked in some cases, but often the horse was killed and sometimes the farmer as well. Later, when tractors were available, the harrow was pulled about 100 feet behind. To this day, those hellish explosives are found in fields and they are still dangerous.

* * *

In mid-summer 1945, Dad came home from POW camp. He had been in Denmark when the war ended and since there had been no fighting there, the Wehrmacht just surrendered to the Danish Resistance and suffered no reprisals from the Danes. They in turn called in some officers of the British Army to make sure that no high-ranking Nazis were among them. The Danes were not interested in keeping POWs; they wanted to get on with their own lives. After a few weeks in holding camps, under shelter and given good meals, the majority of the POWs were released. They were given a Red Cross pass, a travel permit and twenty cigarettes, and told to go home. With no transportation available, it took Dad two weeks to get home. He went to see Mr Abel who still had his job as transport manager for the electric-tram company in town. He was overjoyed to see Dad, and glad to have a driver back. The tram lines had been repaired, rubble was soon cleared from the streets and the overhead cables reconnected, and by August, Dad was back in his old job. He stayed on this job until the trams were replaced by buses in the mid-1950s. He then worked his way through several construction jobs; the rebuilding of bomb-ravaged Germany was in full swing. Later he even worked as a janitor in a school for children of British military officers. He died in 1976 with the knowledge that most of his immediate family had survived the terrible war years. Aunt Carol eventually married again in 1946 and moved to a town near Frankfurt. I never saw her again after she moved and even Dad lost touch with her. I’ll always remember her, however, because she was the link to reality for our family. She lost her husband and personally experienced the emotional pain that the war brought, while we only felt it second-hand. She was a strong woman who inspired the rest of us to be strong when things were really bad.

Mr Vink resumed his job as a furnace stoker for the food-processing plant in our town after the war. There were no more shouts of ‘Lights Out’ for him. He retired sometime in the 1950s. The children, and some adults, may have made fun of him, but he no doubt saved the lives of many of us. I realise now that his was a thankless job that he could have refused, but he, like so many other unsung heroes, did his part in trying to keep us safe. I can see today that he actually did his job well as opposed to so many other officials of the Nazi era who did not. He didn’t personally benefit from the triumphs or tragedies. He was simply doing his job, trying to keep as many of us alive as possible.

By 1949 Brother Len had completed a metalworking apprenticeship and found a temporary job at a farm near the Hürtgen Forest area, milking cows and cutting Binsen, which was the coarse grass preferred by basket weavers. It grew wild all along the Rur River (not the Ruhr) and basket weaving was a big industry in that area at the time. In 1944, there had been a huge battle there and quite often a cow or an unsuspecting farmer became a casualty of the mines left in the forest. During the summer of 1949, I joined Len for two weeks. The farmer that he worked for allowed me to sleep in the straw barn with the mice, sparrows, and nesting owls. After the afternoon milking and feeding, he had free time and at that latitude and time of year, there was daylight until 11:00 p.m. We had plenty of opportunity to search the countryside for war relics and scrap metal. Anti-tank ditches had filled with water and in one, near the village of Siersdorf, we found a US M8 armoured car, which was no doubt left during Operation Clipper. There was no way for us to recover it and it might be still there. A local schoolboy took us to some hidden Westwall bunkers that even the farmers in the area didn’t know about. In those days it wasn’t safe to venture out in the Hürtgen Forest and most people were smart enough to stay out. Some bunkers still had shells and grenades stored in them and others had rusty bed frames arranged like the place had been an aid post during the battle. Helmets, both American and German were everywhere and they would bring about a dime as scrap. Today they are worth a few hundred dollars each. Recently, a friend who lives in the forest found a box with four 20mm barrels preserved in grease. Today there is not much of a market for those things but our Gunnery Sergeant would have given his right arm for them in early 1945.

The end of hostilities brought ‘Beer Hall Strategists’ from the First World War out of their holes like moles from the ground. Mostly they all had nothing better to say than, ‘We told you so’. Brother Len, although not a veteran, despite his claim of being an ‘Old Hand’, maintained that the Westwall should never have been breached and that the Wehrmacht should have obeyed orders and done their duty. Len had dug anti-tank ditches in the vicinity of the wall, and he was disappointed that he had not been awarded a Westwall medal. This Beton Orden medal was for bunker workers only, like the RAD and OT Engineers, not for the Hitler Youth. This medal was jokingly called the ‘Concrete Medal’ by the recipients because of the millions of tons of concrete they used in constructing the wall’s bunkers.

In July 1945, the Americans left and handed M-G over to the British. We were in the British zone of Germany after the country was divided up. The Tommies immediately occupied a few factories that had ceased production and established an ‘Advanced Base Ordnance Depot’, probably foreseeing clashes with the Russians who occupied the eastern half of Germany. For us youngsters who had swapped Nazi relics with the Americans for candy, cigarettes and other goodies, times became pretty hard. It wasn’t that the British were less friendly; they just didn’t have things to spare like the American GIs. On rare occasions, the soldiers threw us an orange or a half-eaten sandwich and watched in delight as we fought over every bite. We knew they had a rubbish dump near the back wall facing the railway tracks and at night we climbed the wall to search for whatever might be edible, like rotting fruit and mouldy cheese. Even beech nuts were collected and used in baking without any harmful effects. The depot, being set up as an advance base for weapons and ammunition, was closely guarded, first by RPs (Regimental Police), then later by Latvian auxiliaries with rifles, but no ammunition - as one good-natured Latvian informed us. The guards patrolled the perimeter in pairs and we had thirty minutes to get over the wall, search for useable items, and get back to safety before the guards came around again. They knew we were there but they hardly ever challenged us. It was like a cat-and-mouse game at times. They were cats without claws and we were mice who could outrun them. Mostly we went for rotting oranges. The peel was dried and then ground to powder in one of our coffee grinders. Brother Len wanted to use one of our grinders to turn his toenail clippings into bone meal for the garden but we drew the line at that.

At the start of the Allied occupation, children often successfully begged the soldiers for scraps of food, candy, coffee, or a leftover meal, but when most of the soldiers left, they had to start digging in their gardens again. There was never enough food to go around. The inner cities had no gardens and the women were pressed into clearing millions of tons of rubble. A new word came into being to describe them. The Trümmerfrau was the average woman whose husband was KIA, MIA or WIA (killed, missing or wounded in action). With a scarf to protect her head and a shovel in her hands, she went to work clearing the roads of rubble, or filling in bomb craters with the hope of finding something useful she could take home with her. With the NSV gone and no welfare organisation to feed the hungry, begging for food and prostitution were the only choices. The black market flourished but the prices were astronomical and only a few people could afford any of the things for sale; most didn’t have anything of value to trade.

At the end of the war, politically-oriented youth organisations were banned in Germany except for the Deutschen Katholischen Jugend (DKJ - the German Catholic Youth Association). Brother Len despised that group, mostly because some of its members were former Edelweiss Pirates. Within a year things changed. The Social Democrat Party (SDP), which had been forbidden by the Nazis, was allowed to recruit new members. The Falcons was a youth group promoted by the SDP and this group, like the SDP, opposed the Communists and was hardly on speaking terms with the DKJ. The Falcons wore a red falcon lapel pin, had flags, and marched through towns singing old pre-Nazi songs. They held youth camps in the country and assembled in weekly meetings to tell their members how nice it was to live in a devastated Germany governed by military occupation, and how they should all look forward to the day when the country would become a social democracy. Had anything really changed since the end of the war? Brother Len joined as soon as the Falcons were established in our area, and with his Hitler Youth leadership skills, he became a group leader in no time. Brother Len, as I have stated earlier, was not very keen on housework and homework, and I think, when the war was over and Germany had lost, his world sort of collapsed around him until he joined the Falcons. There was no more ‘Heil Hitler’; this time the greeting was ‘Friendship’. What did matter was that he was back in command, albeit ‘without portfolio’, which was a Nazi term meaning an honorary position without much authority. Throughout his life, he was always in command of something, whether it was the Falcons, a motorcycle club or a railway preservation society.

* * *

The local factories that had escaped major destruction tried to manufacture something to sell, no matter what it was. There had been a factory just outside town that built sweet-wrapping machines before the war. During the war it was converted into making parts for U-boats. That must have taken some doing to convert a sweet-wrapping machine into a U-boat component. After the war there was no demand for U-boat parts or sweet-wrapping machines so they started making two-wheel carts. Now that was something everyone could use. The wheels were U-boat steering wheels two feet in diameter. The cost of making these carts was minimal and a few thousand of them were made and mostly used by the Trümmerfrau to cart the city’s rubble to a dump outside town. Day and night the clanking of iron wheels on cobblestone streets could be heard all over town.

Brother Len got a job in that factory as a toolmaker. Having a paying job away from home in those days was a drain on a family’s food resources, as the pay didn’t cover even what the worker ate and the job took him away from the garden. The pay was only forty-five Marks a month, about $8 at the time, and factory work in 1946 was hard, with nearly all of the work being done without machinery. The most they could muster was a few sets of acetylene welding units and a drill press. There was no canteen, no washing facilities and the work was forty-eight hours a week. Len’s demand from Mum for his eight-hour workday was six double sandwiches with hard black bread and a pat of vile-smelling margarine. Sometimes he got a paper-thin slice of meat and a little jam. In the winter when things were bad, he would get a bowl of a green concoction called oxtail soup. Why it was named that, I don’t know. It had nothing in common with the backside of a cow, except maybe the colour and the smell. I never knew what was in it. It was sold in shops out of a big bucket by the spoonful, which you mixed with water and boiled into a soup. It tasted similar to a bouillon cube that had been soaked in cod liver oil.